and bashes to the ministrations of my hot-water geyser.
Chapter Seventeen
I was greatly tempted to remain chin-deep in hot water until mid night, but after an hour I forced myself to leave the comforting porcelain nest. As I dried myself with the thick towel, I discovered a number of sensitive patches, and moved over to look at my exterior in the glass. Oh, my.
A long gouge across my collar-bone recalled where a branch had snapped into me, and the butt of the spear had left an angry swelling the area of a man’s hand where it had braced against the hollow of my left shoulder. There was a smaller welt on the outside of my right arm that I couldn’t remember incurring, and several interesting bruises (as well as a general tenderness) where my backside had met the hard earth. I pulled on long sleeves, and with difficulty got my hair into place.
The day’s hand-lettered itinerary said that tea would be served, again on the terrace. With longing glances at the soft bed, I left my rooms: The rest of the party would be away until dinner, and I badly wanted another conversation with my host’s distant cousin before his return.
To my disappointment, Gay Kaur was not there. Nor was Sunny, although her mother was, stolid and flowered and looking restored to herself as she lectured an older Indian gentleman about the Spirit World and her Teacher (one could hear the capital letters). Giving her wide berth, I settled with my cup near a conversational cluster made up of four men and two women whom I had seen previously but not actually met. I nodded a greeting, but did not interrupt.
Their topic was politics. One of the men was a Moslem, who had things to say about Jinnah’s suitability as a Prime Minister, but inevitably Gandhi and his Congress Party dominated the talk. It became increasingly heated, so much so that I thought it was about to become out of control until one of the women rose to her feet. She was a small woman, but she dominated the gathering with ease.
“I shall ask that you two be tossed into the fountain if you can’t keep your heads,” she said. “I propose a change of topic. You’re Miss Russell, aren’t you?” she asked, turning to me. “I’m Faith Hopkins. This is my friend, Lyn Fford, and these argumentative gentlemen are Harry Koehler, Trevor Wilson, Vikram Reddy, and Taran Singh.”
Hands were shaken, and my chair incorporated more fully into their group. No less than four of the names had rung bells in my mind: those of the two women, Wilson’s, and Koehler’s, although of these, only the face of Koehler the American seemed familiar as well.
I started with Trevor Wilson, fairly sure of myself there. “The writer, aren’t you?” He was a novelist, best- selling in the years immediately after the War. Even I had read one of his books, and I read very little fiction.
“I used to be.”
“But it couldn’t be that long since you’ve published, could it?”
“Nineteen months and counting. I’m the maharaja’s secretary. It doesn’t leave me much time for my own work.”
Wilson sounded grim, and I began to say something vaguely encouraging, realised that pretty much any statement I produced would sound patronising, and turned instead to the man whose face tweaked my memory. “Mr Koehler, isn’t it? I believe we’ve met somewhere, although I can’t at the moment remember when it was.”
He turned rather pale and gazed into his tea cup as if it might suddenly hold a shot of something harder. “Oh no, no, I don’t think so. I’d have remembered meeting you.”
I searched his features for clues, but couldn’t retrieve anything more than the vague sense of having seen him in person, across some busy and crowded room. A train station, perhaps? It would come to me, I thought, then went back to the first woman. “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” I told her, “but your name is familiar.”
She laughed. “Not surprising. Lyn and I were all over the headlines a year or so back.”
“The newspapers, yes. Something about the Archbishop of Canterbury, wasn’t it?”
“He eventually became involved, yes.”
The other woman, Lyn, took pity on me. “Faith and I tried to marry. We registered with our parish church, banns were posted, and it wasn’t until we showed up on the day that the priest figured out that Lyn wasn’t a man.”
“If you’d been wearing the morning suit I got you, we’d have managed it,” Faith said with a rueful shake of the head, which launched them on a story in two voices, a narrative of ecclesiastical derring-do and upper-class humour. It sounded like an oft-told tale, but none the less amusing for its worn edges, and I remembered some of the details as she went along. The two were artists, of a sort—one a sculptor of huge ugly bronze masses, the other the creator of bizarre canvases thick with
By common consent, our conversation skirted the topic of politics. Reddy, it turned out, was a playwright who had produced two critically acclaimed plays, the second of which had spent some months on Broadway in New York, before being hired to come here and produce something for the maharaja. He had been here for two years, with nothing to show for it but a lot of paper and a fading presence on Broadway. I didn’t find out who Taran Singh was, aside from being an opponent of Jinnah’s Moslem League, before the sporting contingent arrived, fresh from their horses and smelling of sweat and gunpowder.
I excused myself to go and change for dinner, but I did not go directly to my rooms. Rather, I walked, deep in thought, through the dusk-washed gardens. The mild exercise helped loose my muscles, and the distraction loosed my mind as well, because as I bent to smell a flower I abruptly remembered where I’d seen the face of Harry Koehler.
It was a trial. I’d been there by coincidence, meeting Holmes for dinner (he in a frivolous mood, with a gardenia in his lapel—Ah! The memory had been freed by aroma), and as we left the court-room where he’d been watching a trial, we’d got caught up in the press of people leaving the next room. At their centre had been Koehler, testifying for the defence in a case involving the sex-lives of aristocrats and the embezzlement of a great deal of money. Holmes had pointed him out to me, with the dry comment that the man was one of the best-paid witnesses in London.
So what was he doing in Khanpur?
I stirred myself from my thoughts and was picking my way through the dark garden towards the lighted walls of the palace when the darkness nearby suddenly moved. “Who is there?” I asked sharply.
In response, a flame snapped into being, settling at the end of a cigarette being held by Gay Kaur. “Oh, Miss Kaur, you startled me.”
“Sorry, I was just enjoying the garden. Care for a smoke?”
“Thanks, no, never got the habit.” I felt for the edge of the bench her flame had illuminated, and eased down beside her.
“I hear you made a great success at the pigs,” she said.
“Purely by accident. And I’m black-and-blue all over.”
“Yes, it’s a fairly ferocious sort of entertainment.”
“Your cousin is very good at it.”
“People like us have to be good at something.”
There are a number of ways to approach a statement like that, but in the end, I decided to let it lie, and come in at an angle, trusting to the darkness to encourage confession. “The maharaja seems to have a variety of friends. I mean to say, men with single-minded passions often surround themselves with people of similar interests. But here I’ve met a novelist, a playwright, two avant-garde artists, and of course the Goodhearts.”
“Jimmy’s pets.”
“Pardon me?”
“Jimmy likes to collect interesting people. Animals, too, of course—he’ll probably show you his zoo tomorrow, although he prefers to take people there under a full moon—but he’s forever bringing home some odd character from his travels and giving him a job. Usually something the person is most unsuited for. I suppose it’s more amusing that way.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said, although I was beginning to catch a glimmer.
Gay drew in from her cigarette, the sudden flare of light showing her pensive face, then let out a cloud of fragrant smoke. “We’re spoilt children, all of us, and it can be difficult for someone in Jimmy’s position to think of
